Wednesday, February 23, 2005

It’s time for everyone’s favorite singalong – “where have all the female bloggers gone?”. If you’re a true glutton for punishment dive into the comments. If you’re interested in the personal thoughts of a crawly amphibian, continue reading and I’ll expand on the couple of comments I left there. More thoughts from last go-arounds here .

The more I think about this the more I remember I didn’t start this blog to compete with Drudge or Kos. I started it because I was frustrated that I wasn’t hearing many voices like mine on the internet – outside of a few private (thanks to the trolls) mostly feminist-centered bulletin boards. And it got really old preaching to the choir. We’d wonder why our message wasn’t being reflected anywhere in the mainstream. Certainly not in the mainstream media, but also not in so-called progressive political streams among people who claim to care about women and claim to be our allies.

So RiverRocks was born, to provide the cyber equivalent of a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt. This is my life, these are my thoughts. This is why these issues matter to me. But more importantly, to the casual visitor - this is why you should care. My goal is to provide real-life context for the political issues that are too often totally disregarded just because they’re championed by women who have been tagged with the scarlet “F” that has become the “Feminist” label.

The more this dead old nag gets beaten around the racetrack again and again, the more I realize that frankly I don’t give a shit if my rankings ever reach Instapundit or Atrios levels. Or even those of Drum. I don’t care if the same male readers who get off reading political mags that compare stats of inside the beltway professional politicos like some kind of football game start using my site for their mental masturbation instead. These are guys like my two dittohead coworkers, who snort derisively a dozen times a day as they partake of the crack that’s called Drudge and launch into long John Stossel-ian “can you believe that?” diatribes. But as much as they support Bush and the Iraqi war they’ll never volunteer themselves. As much as they bitch and moan about the state of our public schools they’ll vote against district bond measures everytime, and will never go to a school board meeting to try to provide any kind of a solution to that problem. In short, they’re all talk and no action. What’s worse – be they from the left or right side of the aisle, they’re so wrapped up in their moral and mental superiority that nothing I write stands a chance of percolating through their closed minds anyway.

What I do care about is actually having an impact on the hearts and minds of everyone else. The great uninformed masses that turn to the miracle that is the internet to learn more about things the talking heads on TV or radio gloss over, or ignore entirely. While it’s nice to see the names of blogs I respect on my sitemeter referrals list, I’m more thrilled to see the referrals that come from search engines. Because that means that someone who was curious about a subject I cared enough to write about found *my* thoughts on the matter first. I was actually able to share my perspective on that issue with a total stranger. Someone who hasn’t yet made up their mind about it, and is actively trying to understand the significance.

I’ll take #1 on a google search return over #1 in the TLB Ecosystem anyday.

Wellsprings

Babbles

River Banks

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"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters." — Norman Maclean